John Creary & Tom Wayman Double Book Launch

May 9, 2017 @ 7:00 am - 9:00 pm

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The feel of a gritty urban existence, and the way music can delight, console and inspire are the focuses respectively of two new poetry collections to be launched at Calgary’s Shelf Life Books on Tuesday, May 9.
Calgary’s John Creary will be reading from his debut collection Escape from Wreck City (Anvil Press), together with B.C.’s Tom Wayman who will read from his latest, Helpless Angels (Thistledown Press).
The event begins at 7 p.m. and admission is free. Shelf Life Books is at 1302 4th St. SW.
Creary’s poems present a vivid urban landscape saturated with pop culture and all that a city dweller experiences growing into adulthood in a gritty environment. Calgary neighborhoods, wild parties, relationships, drugs, and car crashes are among the subjects explored, as well as the arrival of adult responsibilities like jobs and new fatherhood,
“I am a rookie, moving through this new tunnel,” Creary says in a poem about a newborn, “with small intuitive steps.”
A multimedia and graphic design teacher at Bowness High, Creary has had poems published in a variety of Canadian literary magazines. In 2016, he was a prizewinner in Kootenay Mountain Culture’s poetry contest.
Wayman lives in southeastern B.C.’s Slocan Valley but taught 2002-2010 at the University of Calgary. He said his most recent book of poems was conceived when he realized that his generation was the first in human history to be able to listen to any music they choose anywhere they go.
“Poems in Helpless Angels reflect on how this development has impacted us throughout our lives,” he said. “Other poems in the collection honor musicians who have been important to me, respond to the music found in nature, or consider the ways music enhances or alters our moods.”
One poem in Helpless Angels was named in February the winner of Musicworks magazine’s “sonic geography” literary contest. Wayman’s 2012 poetry collection Dirty Snow won the Acorn-Plantos Award, and his 2015 collection of short stories about the Slocan Valley, The Shadows We Mistake for Love, won the Diamond Foundation Prize for Fiction (Western Canada Jewish Book Awards). Author of more than 20 poetry collections, as well as various books of fiction and nonfiction, Wayman in 2015 was declared a Vancouver, B.C., Literary Landmark with a plaque on the city’s Commercial Drive commemorating his contribution to Vancouver’s literary heritage.